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Loving it: The intellectual's guide to fashion: The gamine haircut

Female intellectuals tend to date the elfin haircut back to the French avant-garde cinema of Jean Cocteau and Jean-Luc Godard, specifically citing the gamine look of Jean Seberg in A Bout de souffle. As I recall, the look (with a little help from those terrific bosoms in the little white T-shirt she wore to sell newspapers on the Champs Elysées) very much impressed Jean-Paul Belmondo.

But most male intellectuals, because they are bearded men with egg on their sweaters who are scared of women, date it back to their favourite book about elves and dwarves: The Lord of the Rings. Young philosophers or physicists who spy from the library window a suntanned 19-year-old girl, her smooth neck set off by her elfin haircut, her young thighs striding purposefully in her little skirt, her naked shoulders glittering in the evening light, are more than likely to cry out: “Heavens to Betsy,